SharePoint Daily for April 23, 2009

Top News StoriesSharePoint Steers Companies Through Economic Downturn (Fresh Business Thinking)Microsoft SharePoint is a collaboration tool that enables businesses to access and store important company information and documents securely via a web portal, or intranet. As Hosted SharePoint 2007 is a web-based application, remote workers can access the same level of data as office based staff, reducing file duplication, improving employee productivity and overall efficiency.

Can You Find the Enhancements in Exchange 2010? (Info World)Last week, Microsoft released the first Beta of Exchange 2010 and in the InfoWorld Test Center's first look at Exchange 2010, Martin Heller wrote that it marked a "major step up from Exchange Server 2007." This week, let's dig a bit deeper into this beta release and see what true enhancements are coming our way with Exchange 2010.

Microsoft Cancels 2009 BI Conference, Schedules It For Every Two Years (Channel Web)Citing the recession and cutbacks in travel budgets, Microsoft has canceled this year's October Microsoft BI Conference, according to a posting on the company's Web site blog. Microsoft also disclosed that from now on, the BI Conference will be a biennial event, with the next conference scheduled for October 2010 in Seattle and subsequent conferences held every other year.

How IT Must Prepare for Windows 7 (PC World)Though eight years old, Windows XP still powers 71 percent of all PCs, according to a recent report from Forrester. That translates to millions of users that Microsoft must convince to upgrade to either Vista or the upcoming Windows 7. This has proven to be no easy task, especially in the enterprise sector. A high level of satisfaction with Windows XP from IT professionals combined with a down economy is keeping many from moving on. In a recent survey of 1,100 IT professionals from Dimensional Research, 72 percent said they are more concerned about upgrading to Windows 7 than staying with an outdated XP operating system.

Microsoft Global System Aids Worker Rescue (PC World)It's late November 2008 and antigovernment protestors have taken over Bangkok's airport. Thousands of travelers from around the world are literally stranded and fear a violent clash between pro- and antigovernment demonstrators. Just after reports of the problems at the airport surface, Brian Tuskan, senior director of Microsoft Global Security, gets a message on his Windows Mobile phone alerting him that 30 employees who had travelled to Thailand for business are now stuck. It's his job to make sure that Microsoft workers remain safe. "Our goal was to run incident management in case things went south," Tuskan said of the Bangkok situation.

Microsoft Ready to Deal: Good Time to Plan Windows 7, Office 2010 Purchases, Analyst says (Network World)Corporations armed with a savvy knowledge of Microsoft's volume licensing program may be in the best position in a long time to negotiate the cost of software, according to one analyst. "Resellers are saying there has never been a better time to negotiate with Microsoft," says Paul DeGroot, an analyst with independent analyst firm Directions on Microsoft. "It is a buyer's market, and it is a time when customers have had unusual bargaining power with Microsoft."

Office 2010 Gets a Redesigned Logo (Softpedia)On April 15, 2009, Microsoft confirmed officially that the next iteration of the Office System, codenamed Office 14, would be branded as Office 2010. The Redmond company is in the early stages of development, but it has already delivered an Alpha version of Office 2010 to selected testers. Subsequently, screenshots of Office 14 were leaked into the wild, and you can get a taste of what the successor of Office 2007 will have to offer via the images included with this article (courtesy of iGeneration).

Microsoft Pushes End-to-End Security at RSA (Windows IT Pro)This week at the RSA Conference 2009 in San Francisco, Microsoft is pushing its concept of End to End Trust, its vision of a safer, more trusted Internet. Microsoft first introduced this concept at last year's show, but this year the software giant is pointing at progress it has made and is issuing a call to the industry to discuss, collaborate, and agree on Internet security going forward.

Around the BlogosphereHarnessing the Power of Community 2.0 (Dux Sy)In late 2008, Michael Lotter had a vision to promote SharePoint by organizing a free, community-driven, not for profit, one day conference that will showcase leading SharePoint thought leaders to voluntarily speak and share their expertise to benefit the greater public. SharePoint Saturday was born.

Simple But Effective Techie Troubleshooting Tip (Brain Litter)Someone asked this on Experts Exchange today, so I posted my 2 bits. As someone who daily runs into a 'gosh, that's weird or new' in technology, I find this simple but effective technical troubleshooting/research technique very useful. As simple as my comments might be, if you aren't doing this 'method' when googling/investigating errors, etc. maybe you should try it (lots of FUD out there, I find this method is useful for wading through the bumpf). I'm sure, like me, you only want to apply the fix 'once'.

Solution: Compiling MOSS Audience Adds No New Members (Paul Galvin's SharePoint Space)I was working with a co-worker yesterday and he was building out a MOSS audience based on a custom user profile property in MOSS. In this case, the audience property is named “SITECD” and by convention, stores a 3 character code. He had defined the audience and a rule that said that if “SITECD equals ‘ABG’”, then include that user profile in the audience.

Project Server and SharePoint Server - Better Together or Apart? (SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land)In the last month I’ve had a few design sessions and conversations where more than just WSS and SharePoint Server are involved in the deployment. In one customer it was wild… MS CRM, Performance Point, and Project Server plus the normal MOSS stack. They were going to do it all in one farm with a bunch of app servers and even add a SQL Reporting server and SQL Analysis server. It gave me a headache looking at their diagram.

Around Bamboo NationAdding a New User or Group to an Existing SharePoint Site (SharePoint Blank)A colleague and newly inducted member of my department asked me the other day if it was intentional that she didn't have access to update the editorial calendar (which I own) on our department's site. After assuring her that it was not at all intentional, and that I would be more than happy to grant her the necessary permissions to the site, I realized that there were a couple of other new team members also in need of a "promotion" of their permissions within the site.

Bamboo Welcomes Skyline Technologies, Inc. to the Partner Advantage Program (The Bamboo Team Blog)We are excited that Skyline Technologies, Inc. has joined our Partner Advantage Program. Skyline Technologies, Inc. is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner organization that specializes in adapting Microsoft solutions to individual client's needs. Skyline has been helping organizations advance their IT capabilities since 1992, guiding clients through client/server technology, the Internet explosion, e-commerce development, and now Web 2.0 into Web 3.0. They focus on business intelligence, enterprise collaboration and portals, online marketing and one-of-a-kind solutions.

The "Add users to a SharePoint group" SharePoint Group drop-down is disabled (KBAlertz - Microsoft Knowledge Base Article)When you try to add a user to a SharePoint Group, the "Add users to a SharePoint group" drop-down is disabled. If you create a Web application and a site collection through SharePoint object model code and create custom SharePoint groups that are derived from default groups and forget to define oSiteGroup for the oSite.RootWeb.AssociatedMemberGroup then you will experience this problem.